Last week, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, published a report titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.” As its title suggests, the report—which came only days after the Supreme Court upheld laws banning trans women from women’s sports—takes aim at Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds and was directly responsible for the creation of women’s sports programs in K-12 schools.
Its author, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow and Boise State University political science professor^[I'd not take a class from him.] Scott Yenor, chooses to introduce the topic in a familiar way: transphobia. Here, he opens with a nod to the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Imane Khelif, writing that “in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal.” Already, he gets the facts wrong: Imane Khelif is Algerian, and she isn’t transgender, but regardless, he presses on and uses Khelif to call for laws that “define and uphold the physical differences between men and women.”
However, Yenor is merely using the topic of trans athletes—one that right-wing groups have manufactured as a way to get many Americans comfortable with discriminatory policies—as a springboard for his true target: women’s sports, and more specifically, “the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades.” This feminism, he writes, aimed to make women “more independent and even dominant and less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces^[Um, what?],” and as a result, “Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates.”
His central argument is simple: Title IX has created “a prejudice in favor of a male-normed competitive model for women’s sports and a prejudice against men’s non-revenue programs,” and these prejudices “rest on [the] false premise that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are stereotypes to be engineered away.” As he clarifies later, he believes that women, when compared to men, are naturally less ‘aggressive, assertive, and dominant’^[Someone's not met actual women.] and less interested in sports^[Because once women are out of college, they don't engage in things like roller derby.], and therefore, giving men more sporting opportunities isn’t discriminatory^[Narrator: "It is."]. Rather, according to Yenor, the discrimination lies in giving women equality, as Title IX’s mandates of equal spending and parity in competitive opportunity meant “colleges learned that the safest (and often cheapest) path to compliance was cutting men’s non-revenue programs rather than adding women’s teams or controlling costs in football and men’s basketball.”
Nonrevenue programs, eh? Like, sports that people play for fun instead of to make the university money? So, first it was the handful of trans athletes, then the problem was women being forced against their will to be assertive and competitive and thus less fertile, and now it's monetary?
Picking a lane is easy. Less so when the lanes are on completely different roads.